It's nice to find something with the depth and effort of good fiction on the movie screen, and "The Emperor's Club" is in that welcome category. Based on the short story "The Palace Thief," by Ethan Canin, the picture uses a couple of compelling incidents to create what emerges as a substantial examination of character, morality and destiny.

This comes as a surprise, because much of the movie seems like a series of cliches about boys' prep schools and dedicated, selfless teachers. Kevin Kline plays Mr. Hundert, a Greek and Roman history teacher who balances his exacting classroom manner with a tendency to tear up on demand -- so we know he really cares. It seems we're in for a classical version of "Dead Poets Society," but no. Slowly and carefully, the movie is setting up something else entirely.

Much of the picture is told in flashback to the 1970s, a '70s, incidentally,

that director Michael Hoffman does not try to re-create in style, dress or even talk (someone utters an anachronistic "Duh!"). Mr. Hundert's classroom exists outside time, inside a platonic ideal where teachers speak and students open up like flowers. And then one day a snake enters the garden, a U.S. senator's son named Sedgewick Bell (Emile Hirsch). He looks angelic and acts demonic, and completely charms not only his fellow students but also Mr. Hundert, who is somehow seduced into taking on Sedgewick as a special challenge.

In Hundert, Kline finds himself trapped in a role with no dark side, no subtext, no capacity to surprise the audience -- and yet that soon becomes all right, once we realize that Hundert's real function is to observe Sedgewick, who brings turmoil but also life into Hundert's arid classroom. The movie benefits enormously from Hirsch's knowing and spontaneous performance as Sedgewick. Hirsch's reactive face clearly registers every shade of emotion. If the kid were merely obnoxious, there'd be no movie, but Hirsch beguiles the audience, just as Sedgewick beguiles his teacher.

The action of "The Emperor's Club" concerns a competition held every year at the prep school. Students take a series of tests in classical history, and then three finalists compete onstage for the exalted title of "Mr. Julius Caesar." The irony is never remarked upon but is there for all to notice: A school that prides itself on its moral uprightness names its highest honor after a political leader with the morals of a murderous gangster, a man who spent his entire adult life maneuvering to transform a republic into a dictatorship.

That's the true Emperor's Club, not one made up of diligent scholars who play by the rules but of lords of the universe who win any way they can. It's the sad reality that Hundert spends his life ignoring but that the movie is willing to face.

"The Emperor's Club," so satisfying in its big themes, sometimes rankles in its details. There's a preciousness to some scenes, and it's not just Hundert's preciousness but the movie's. The teacher's great romance, with a colleague (Embeth Davidtz), is presented as so achingly genteel that she seems more like a beard, thrown in so we won't suspect anything unwholesome in Hundert's devotion to his boys. There's also a nagging sense that the movie is in some way a celebration of the privileged world it's supposedly holding to account. Twenty-five years later, the boys have a reunion, with Hundert as their honored guest, and we discover that these guys are now all rich and running the country.

Still, it's in the epilogue that "The Emperor's Club" really pays off, with Joel Gretsch suitably complex and enigmatic as the adult Sedgewick, a performance very much in harmony with the Sedgewick we knew as a young man. . This film contains very mild sexual references.